Greg Iles: The Death Factory: A Penn Cage Novella

My present dilemma is how to persuade my mother to leave Dad’s bedside long enough for me to ask him again what he needed to tell me. Perhaps the passage of time has improved his short-­term memory, or eased whatever anxiety is keeping him quiet. Mom has scarcely taken a bite off the trays the nurses have brought, nor has she tasted the fare Caitlin brought in from a local restaurant. For now, I’m working in an uncomfortable chair in the single vacant patient cubicle in the ICU, which has become our informal command center for coordinating this crisis.

My PowerBook lies on the bed, along with my BlackBerry, a Martin Cruz Smith paperback, today’s Examiner, and work papers from City Hall. An hour ago, unable to deal with the constant barrage of calls from around the state and country, I switched my phone to silent and tried to focus on the novel. My effort was in vain. Again and again I found myself reading the same page while my mind wandered, filling with violent, rushing images from the past ten days. At one time or another during that period, all my family members were put under threat of death, two close friends of mine were killed, and I ultimately had to kill a man. For the first ­couple of days after that event, I felt I was dealing with it pretty well. But my father’s unexpected heart attack coming on the heels of all that seems to have triggered a delayed shock reaction. Since I arrived at the hospital, doctors and nurses have shaken or squeezed my arm to bring me out of a kind of fugue state. One doctor even suggested that I have a neurological exam, given the savage fight I endured only days ago. But the odd trances I’m slipping into feel more like the result of emotional shock than physical trauma.

Rubbing my eyes hard, I focus on the novel again. For a ­couple of minutes Smith’s poetic descriptions of modern Russia draw me out of myself. But then the muted pulses and beeps of the medical gear outside the cubicle lull me into a kind of half sleep. When the glass door to my left slides open, I’m expecting a nurse or administrator to tell me they need the cubicle for a critical patient. Instead I find my father’s youngest brother, Jack Cage, looking down at me with concern.

“My God,” I say, glancing at my watch, afraid that I’ve slept away six or seven hours. But I haven’t. “How the hell . . . ?”

Uncle Jack smiles. “You know I was never much for waiting.”

Jack Cage is seventeen years younger than my father—­effectively from a different generation altogether. While Dad lived through the Depression as a boy, Jack was a classic baby boomer. He sported long hair, rode a motorcycle, and barely escaped serving in Vietnam, thanks to a congenital hearing problem. Though I seldom saw Jack when I was a boy, I idolized him. Unlike Dad’s other brothers, who spent their lives in one branch or another of the military, Jack moved to the West Coast and worked in the aerospace industry. By the mid-­1980s, he’d switched to the computer business, and now he lives in comfortable semiretirement in Mountain View, California. Jack still has longer hair than most men his age (though it’s silver-­white now), and his eyes have not lost their youthful twinkle.

“Why didn’t you call ahead?” I ask, getting to my feet and hugging him.

“I’ve been calling you for the past half hour. Your cell kept kicking me to voice mail.”

“But why didn’t you call from California?”

He draws back, still squeezing my arm as though to hold me up. “We talked, didn’t we? I just didn’t want to give you guys any false hope that I could get here this fast.”

“How did you get here?”

A familiar, enigmatic smile tugs at his mouth. “A friend of a friend has a plane.”

I glance at my watch again, doing the math. “Must be some plane.”

“Hey, I wasn’t going to let my big brother go down without saying good-­bye, just because the airlines have lousy route tables.”

Jack’s buoying presence feels semimiraculous, as though I’ve surfaced from a dark maelstrom. “Has Mom seen you?”

“Not yet. I saw her through the glass, hunched over the bed with her arm on Tom’s legs. I didn’t know if I should just bust in there.”

“Come on.”

WHEN MY MOTHER sees Jack, tears fill her eyes. She hugs him for a full ten seconds, pulls back and looks at him as though she can’t believe her eyes, then hugs him again. After convincing herself that he’s really here, she gently takes my father’s hand and squeezes it.

“Tom?” she says near his ear. “Tom? Look who’s come to see you.”

Dad’s eyes flutter, then open and slowly focus as he turns his head toward us. A faint smile touches his lips. “I’ll be damned. It’s Tonto.”

Mom is softly rubbing Dad’s arm, as though he might fade into nothingness at any moment. “You’re the first to make it in,” she tells Jack. “Phil might be in late tonight.”

“I cheated,” Jack says with a smile. “But don’t tell Phil that.” He steps forward and takes Dad by the hand. “How you doing, Kemosabe? Not so great, huh?”

“Better than the friends I read about in the obituaries this morning.”

“That’s the spirit. Do you remember anything of what happened?”

Dad slowly moves his head from side to side. “Just a hell of a pain in my back. Nothing after that.”

“Well, you’ve got nothing to do now but loaf around and let ­people tell you how glad they are you made it.”

“That’s right,” Dad says, after a ten-­second delay.

He closes his eyes, takes a few labored breaths, then opens them enough to locate his baby brother again. “I thought I was taking my last ride this time, Jack.”

“You’ve got a lot of trail left yet,” my uncle says with assurance.

Mom smiles, but I see her chin quivering.

“Peg,” Jack says softly. “Why don’t you let me spell you for a little while?”

“Oh, no. I have to stay here.”

“Go, Peggy,” Dad whispers. “Take a break.”

“I’m not going anywhere. Not yet.”

Jack gives her a chiding glance. “You don’t want to hog all the quality time, do you? What do you think I came out here for?”

This was a good try, since Mom has a highly developed sense of guilt, but after a ­couple seconds, she sees through Jack’s ploy. “No, you’ve had a long trip. You go with Penn.” She takes my hand. “Drive Jack over to our house and get him settled.”

“No,” Jack says. “I’ve got a hotel room right up the road.”

“That’s ridiculous! Why waste good money on a hotel?”

Jack smiles and shakes his head. “Don’t worry about it, Peg.”

“I’ll put him up with me, Mom,” I interject, knowing it’s the quickest way out of this pointless discussion.

“You two go on,” she insists. “Get Jack settled. I’ll take a break later on, after Tom’s had some rest and those enzyme tests come back.”

Jack hesitates, then hugs my mom once more and says, “All right, Peg. I’ll see you in a ­couple of hours.”

Leaning down over my father, Jack squeezes his hand once more, until Dad opens his eyes and nods as if to say I’m still here.

“I’ll take care of everything,” Jack says. “You get some rest.”

After Dad nods, Jack straightens up and quickly walks to the door of the cubicle, wiping his eyes on his shirtsleeve. Mom and I follow him with our eyes, and then I go after him. At the nurses’ station, Jack picks up a weekend bag, and we start toward the hospital lobby.

“Did you fly right into Natchez?” I ask.

“Hell, yes. They didn’t have any rental cars, but when the guy who runs the airport found out why I’d come, he offered to drive me into town himself. I knew then that I was back in the South.”

In the lobby, a nurse stops me and asks how Dad is doing. I give her a brief update, and then Jack and I head for the parking lot, where the late afternoon sun has come from behind the clouds.